The Ultimate Guide to Healthcare Recruiting During COVID-19

Even before COVID-19, because of an aging global population, there was a severe global shortage of healthcare professionals. Because of COVID-19 hospitals and state governments are hiring thousands of healthcare professionals almost everywhere across the globe. Is your staffing agency prepared to adapt to the new healthcare recruiting markets? We’re going to be in a highly volatile hiring market for the next 12-18 months.

4 Million Unemployed Healthcare Professionals

How can you meet the hiring needs of surge centers, urgent, care, and ICU professionals? You need candidates! There’s another trend happening in healthcare right now. About 4 million medical professionals have been laid off from private practices alone.

Why is this happening? Well, due to movement restrictions, many private practices have had to stop operations and furlough and in most cases lay off workers.

So what you have here is a large market of unemployed healthcare workers and a high demand for healthcare professionals to manage surge centers for COVID treatment all over the world.

So, the question becomes, how is your staffing company going to provide talent rapidly by:

Finding the people who’ve been laid off (hint they are probably already in your database)

Connecting them with travel nursing and per diem physician positions that are in extremely high demand

There’s a strategy that 6 of the 8 largest staffing companies in the world are using to hire for critical infrastructure positions in healthcare. You can use this same strategy to deliver critical talent and keep your agency profitable and not only survive but grow through this economic crisis.

It’s really important though that you use this strategy because it’ll help you adapt to a volatile market.

The Healthcare Recruiting Market is Volatile

Already we’re seeing slowdowns in infection rates due to shelter in place in CA and NY. However, economic pressures are pushing for shelter in place to be lifted. We’re going to see a mix of 2 scenarios play out here.

When the shelter in place orders lift, we’re going to see the rehiring of non-COVID healthcare workers due to demand for non-COVID non-emergency healthcare treatment.

However, after shelter in place is lifted we’re going to see surges in COVID cases which will result in sudden urgent needs for healthcare personnel. Then we’re going to see another cycle of movement restrictions, followed by the layoffs and furloughs.

So right now the market conditions indicate a healthcare hiring space that needs high volumes of temporary medical staff, very quickly, in multiple locations. Things are going to be turbulent for the foreseeable future.

What the healthcare market needs is a way to suddenly shift healthcare workers from states where there’s low infection counts to states with higher infection counts and demand.

Is your staffing company ready to accommodate that? Do you have the technology and process infrastructure needed to support this kind of hiring? Aren’t you already operating with limited staff and budget due to the economic slowdown?

Following best practices for your healthcare recruiting strategy will help you win.

2 Best Practices for Healthcare Recruiting

We work with some of the largest healthcare staffing companies in the world. And many of our customers are working to fill critical infrastructure positions in healthcare.

From analyzing the conversations our recruiting AI is having with healthcare workers we’ve found that a best practice is to be more transparent about crisis rate pay earlier on in the conversation.

If you can share that number upfront you’re going get a lot more responses and engagement.

Now if you use conversational AI to support your sourcing efforts, you’ll find it’s highly effective. We’ve already figured out the most engaging conversations.

So is conversational AI effective for healthcare staffing during COVID? Yes! We have a 94% schedule rate for ICU nurses.

Another one of our clients is using conversational AI to run 3 campaigns a week, with 300-500 candidates per campaign. They’ve been able to almost fill 100 positions for ICU nurses in New York for their client in just 3 weeks.

You should absolutely be using conversational AI to support your healthcare recruiting.

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